A high-stakes vote is underway to choose Hyperliquid’s native stablecoin.
The Stripe-aligned Native Markets has taken an early but slim lead.
The winner will control a 5.5 billion dollar prize and a key DeFi rail.
The opening shots have been fired in a high-stakes and hotly contested battle for the financial soul of one of crypto’s fastest-growing exchanges.
The race to mint Hyperliquid’s native stablecoin, USDH, is underway, and in the early innings, the formidable, Stripe-aligned Native Markets team has seized a tenuous lead.
But with the majority of voting power still on the sidelines, the ultimate prize remains very much up for grabs.
As of Thursday morning in Hong Kong, Native Markets has secured 30.8 percent of the delegated stake, a lead built on the back of heavyweight validators like infinitefield.xyz and Alphaticks.
Its closest rivals, the New York-regulated Paxos Labs and the innovative Ethena, are trailing at 7.6 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively. Other contenders, despite splashy proposals, have yet to gain significant traction.
The undecided whales and the path to victory
But this is not a race that will be won in the early stages. The bigger and more decisive picture is that more than half of the total stake—a commanding 57 percent—remains unassigned.
This silent majority includes some of the most powerful and influential validators on the Hyperliquid network, including the single largest, Nansen x HypurrCollective, which alone controls over 18 percent of the vote, and the institutional giant, Galaxy Digital.
The final outcome will be decided by where these titans ultimately land.
Their votes will determine whether Native Markets’ early momentum is a decisive opening salvo or merely a fleeting lead in a long and unpredictable war. The deadline for this crucial decision is September 14.
A prize beyond measure
The stakes of this contest cannot be overstated. This is far more than a simple token launch; it is a battle to wire a new stablecoin directly into the financial backbone of a DeFi powerhouse.
Hyperliquid currently holds a staggering 5.5 billion dollars in USDC deposits, a sum that represents roughly 7.5 percent of that stablecoin’s entire circulating supply.
Replacing that with USDH would be a monumental shift, redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars in annual Treasury yield to the winning protocol.
The contenders have come to the table with lavish promises to woo the validators. Paxos has pledged 95 percent of its earnings to buy back Hyperliquid’s native HYPE token.
Frax has promised 100 percent of its yield directly to users. Agora has offered 100 percent of its net yield alongside institutional-grade custodianship.
With Hyperliquid already commanding nearly 80 percent of the decentralized perpetuals trading market, the winner of this contest will not just be minting a stablecoin; they will be forging a new, foundational rail for the future of decentralized finance.
Market updates
BTC: Bitcoin is trading at 114,053 dollars, up 2.6 percent in the past 24 hours. The move reflects a short-term rebound fueled by positive risk sentiment, even as a longer-term consolidation continues.
ETH: Ethereum is trading at 4,373.99 dollars, up 2 percent, as investors shrug off a recent mass-slashing event that penalized over 30 validators, a sign of the network’s underlying resilience.
Gold: Gold is holding near 3,635 dollars an ounce after hitting a peak of 3,674 dollars on Tuesday. Investors are awaiting U.S. inflation data, while the investment bank ANZ has raised its year-end gold target to 3,800 dollars, seeing a potential peak near 4,000 dollars by next June.
